Sir Henry Rider Haggard's fourteenth novel, Eric Brighteyes (1891), is not among his best-known works. Few modern readers are familiar with any of Haggard's fiction – more than fifty novels – except for three popular tales of African adventure: King Solomon's Mines (1885), She (1887), and Allan Quatermain (1887); these novels, especially She, are the usual points of reference in Haggard studies. However, in addition to these and other African novels, Haggard wrote several set in Victorian England as well as historical novels set in different countries and times. Among the latter, Eric Brighteyes, a historical novel – or “romance” as Haggard called it – of the Middle Ages, is set in tenth-century Iceland and manifests a special relationship to the Icelandic sagas. Although Eric Brighteyes is written for popular entertainment and never pretends otherwise, the novel is noteworthy both for its relationship to Haggard's other work, especially his English novels, and as a very special contribution to the field of Victorian medievalism in historical fiction. In The Vikings and the Victorians Andrew Wawn calls it “arguably the finest Victorian Viking-age novel” and “a remarkable illustration of just how inward a knowledge of Icelandic sagas could be developed in 1890 by a dedicated enthusiast of the old north, even one who was in no real sense a professional philologist.” 1 To expand this statement, what results from Haggard's use of saga-models is also a demonstration, through the opportune medium of “old north” literature, of his own recurring authorial concerns.

Eric Brighteyes appears at the intersection of two significant trends in Victorian readership: a renewed popular taste for historical fiction and a growing interest in Icelandic sagas in the second half of the nineteenth century. In The Historical Novel from Scott to Sabatini, Harold Orel outlines a general distinction in historical fiction-writing, emerging by 1880, between a “ ‘recovered past’ – in historical novels based on a careful study of books, documents, archives, and visits to sites that had figured prominently in actual events – and the ‘felt’ past – in a historical novel that imagined the emotional responses of fictional characters who lived at some moment prior to the novelist's lifetime.” Eric Brighteyes combines elements from both these categories; the sagas on which it drew were themselves regarded at the time as versions of “history,” and Haggard read sagas and visited saga-sites for “atmosphere” before re-creating the “felt” past of his characters.